Muralist to send AIDS message via
international seminar
Date: July 8, 2000
Section: Living
Edition: Final
GAIL MEADOWS, Herald Staff
Xavier Cortada, the Miami mural painter with the golden touch, is off to Durban, South
Africa, for the XIII International AIDS Conference, where he's to lead participants in
painting Breaking the Silence, the conference's official mural.
He did the same thing two years ago at the most recent international AIDS conference, in
Geneva.
Cortada will lead participants in writing messages about AIDS on pieces of paper, as he
did in Switzerland. He then glues the messages on the background of the canvas he's
painting. The finished product, 20 feet long, will be unveiled at the closing session of
the conference and presented to the people of South Africa.
``These murals,'' says Cortada ``are powerful not only because they generate much needed
awareness, but because they document what our global community had to say [in virtually
every language] about AIDS'' during a critical time for Africa, where AIDS is epidemic.
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